Posts tagged: performance
Optimizing lz4_stream for Uncached Memory 20 Nov 2025
The loading side of my content framework relies heavily on compression, but it also relies on the compression library being able to pause and resume (in the way that the standard zlib and LZMA interfaces allow), which isn't (wasn't?) available with LZ4 back when I first adopted the format. So I wrote my own LZ4 decoder to support just that. Unfortunately, I recently hit a really bad performance snag.
Read more...Vulkan Memory Types 07 Sep 2025
Picking up the discussion on memory and caching: how does this all interact with an external processor such as a GPU? GPUs are an intersting addition to this discussion because their operation is very memory-bound and very very multi-core. They also run alongside CPUs. This makes things ...complicated.
Read more...How Cache Impacts Software 06 Sep 2025
Knowing that main memory is slow (relative to what otherwise goes on in the CPU), software can do a few things to run faster. These things all boil down to just "work with the CPU's cache and don't ever fight it".
Read more...Memory and Physics 05 Sep 2025
Computers have both a superpower and a problem: they are physical objects. And what the laws of physics give in terms of the massive potential to do work in parallel, they take away in the speed-of-light limit and heat. All of this has to be engineered around.
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